Golya Cha Sambhar / Maharashtrian cuisine

I wanted to learn how to make this gravy since long. My aaji makes it sometimes, and today, I saw the recipe on a cookery show and decided to finally try it.

Golya cha sambhar consists of small, round dumplings made from chick-pea flour, lots of spices and tamarind or lemon for the tang. We add some jaggery too, but some prefer it completely hot.

Ingredients and method to make the dumplings:
About 4 cups besan (I assume it's chickpea flour in English. A friend is convinced I call it gram flour instead :)
1 cup of finely chopped onions
Finely-chopped coriander (optional)
1 tablespoon oil
Generous amounts of red chilli powder, dhana-jeeru powder, salt. And a pinch of turmeric, asafoetida, sugar.

Adding very little water, make dough using the above ingredients. Then, make small round dumplings as shown in the photo. Keep aside.

Ingredients and method to make the gravy:
1 cup finely-chopped onion
2-3 tablespoon grated fresh or dry coconut (I used dried coconut)
Oil, pinch of mustard seeds, cumin, turmeric, asafoetida, raw green chillies for tadka
Goda masala (A typical maharashtrian garam masala, easily found in Pune / Mumbai)
Coarsely-crushed black pepper
A lemon-sized ball of tamarind, soaked for sometime. Use the extract.
1 tablespoon jaggery (Optional)
About 700 ml water (Adjust depending on the number of dumplings you have made)
Chickpea flour to adjust consistency of the gravy. Use as required.

Method:
Heat oil in a heavy-bottomed pan. Add the ingredients mentioned for the tadka, in that order, and then add chopped onions. Saute for a minute or two and add grated coconut. Saute for about five minutes, or till coconut turns slightly brown. Add goda masala, dhana-jeeru powder, red chilli powder. Add water and bring to boil.

Add the chickpea dumplings to the boiling water and cover the vessel with a lid. Put some water on the lid so that the dumplings are steamed faster. It will take about 15 minutes for the dumplings to cook. The dough should be tight, otherwise dumplings may break apart when added to water.

Add a tablespoon of chickpea flour to the gravy is required. (On my first attempt, the gravy became a little more dense than is required, but tasted just fine) When the dumplings get cooked, they float above. Now, add tamarind paste, jaggery, salt and black pepper. Adjust spices as required. Let the gravy boil over once and switch off the gas. Garnish with finely-chopped coriander.


1) Golya cha sambhar 2) Apple, grape and walnut salad in fresh cream 3) Mango pickle 4) Tomato aam-papad chutney

While eating, crush the dumplings with you fingers and eat with rice. Also goes well with chapati / bhakhri.

Gudi Padva wishes

Padvya Cha Hardik Shubhechha*

Happy New Year, here's wishing for a new year that is happier and more promising than what all the preceding years have brought in their totality. Now that's an ambitious wish! But I can wish and hope so much only because God has been giving and because I have faith in his unassuming, mysterious ways.

Hope to upload some photos towards the evening and edit this post. So drop back later if you can.

Wishes!

*Gudi Padva is when Maharashtrians celebrate their New Year.

Edited to add a few hours later:

This is what I made just after posting this.



Ghavlya chi kheer

I made these little vermicelli-like brown bits from dough made from flour and milk. These look somewhat like wheat grains, and so the name "ghavle". Ghav in Marathi and Gujarati means wheat.

Wonder what are those leaves there in the small dish? Neem leaves (Azadirachta indica).. We start our New Year day by eating this bitter leaf. Many people have these neem leaves / juice or paste for the entire month... Been a very strong tradition, and my grandmother offers no other fancy explanation other than "it's supposed to be good for health."

Life rules, and how...

My blog is my salve. It's been some time now that it is keeping me company like a soulmate in those unearthly hours long after midnight and much before dawn .

There's this aversion to write analytically about current, disturbing issues. Similar to wanting to see a fun, masti movie instead of one with moral highgrounds once in a while.

For example, barely a few days after Shiv Sena blasted SRK for speaking up for a one-off comment in favour of Pakistani cricketers, my aaji pointed out that the party was mum when the Pakistani hockey team was playing India. Good blog-worthy point, I thought. Are controversies raised only when big finances (read SRK and cricket) are involved. Are controversies raked up only when big businesses can be held at ransom?

I could have read up and written, but I was not inclined to. I choose to focus on many other issues — extremely trivial but very personal...

Many more poems have filled up the little diary. My phone is busier than usual. My pets demand attention. I have discovered that I love gardening. We are coming closer, bonding better. It surprises me how life can take the turns you want. It surprises me even more how easy it is to let go and how difficult to hold on — or vice versa.

Some friends from the blogosphere have abandoned their blogs. It is an unfortunate loss to readers like me who take strength from their random, magical lives. Some new writers are coming to notice.

Life rules, and how? :)

Poems — In your language :)

This is an excerpt of a lovely poem by Baruk:

in your language, not mine
will i abuse and curse at you
and scream and rail and rant at you
in your language, not mine.

The poem has been recognized by Amnesty International (Aotearoa New Zealand) and was read out on Courage Day.

Also read this post called Grin and the interesting discussions in the comment section.

Initially when I began reading his blog, I thought his posts were too full of anger. Then, I slowly got used to his way of writing and began loving the way he morphs his angst into lovely, strong poems.

Ever so often, I feel sad that poems only pose prodding questions in a wordy way, questions to which we have no answers and so get frustrated. Once out of the system, the best a good poem can do is to act as a catalyst for more thoughts, introspection and sometimes debates. But even within this limited scope, poems can do a mighty lot.

Read about George Orwell's take on poems that I mentioned in this long post. He says that poems can survive even in the face of totalitarianism. Excerpts from Orwell's essay are written towards the end.

Coming back to this poem...

As I read In your language not mine again, I realise how relevant it is in the vicious times we live in. The immediate connect reading it this time was with the episode in which MNS members of legislature allegedly manhandled and even slapped Samajwadi party MLA Abu Azmi when he began taking his oath in Hindi. Some people were actually cheering the vandalism as another act of bravado in defense of Marathi asmita...

My favourite poem from Baruk is Api's thlan

How Marathi is Marathi?

How Marathi is Marathi?
How Migrant is Migrant?

I safely landed in Mumbai and zoomed to the house thanks to a very traffic free road left unventured by a scared / cautious public. Mumbai was on fire once again thanks to the ancient 'Marathi manoos vs. others' debate.

All thru my drive home, I met with different opinions, different theories and none seemed to convince me enough. It might be a virtue of having grown up in an environment very indifferent to politics but I, for one, try not to digest any set of theory readily, however logical it may sound, if it has a political tinge of thought process behind it. I take my own sweet little time and exert a lot more caution. Be it the very left, or the very right pattern of thinking, as fate would have it, my origin and my residence, both is so strategic that off late I find myself humouring away the diverse set of clear and crisp ideologies that relatives on each side adhere to.

The argument people put here is simple. That the migrant population is an undue, uninvited burden and hardworking though they may, the immigrants by the thousands fill up local trains, erect slums and flourishing ghettos in no time. The infrastructure of this city (Mumbai) is getting burdened and may collapse pretty soon if the inflow of people is not checked. More, the parent states have 'failed' (and so are to be blamed) for their people need to leave their states in such large numbers to earn their livelihood.

There are a few basic things that come to my mind to counter the above logic:

1) Can anyone in this country decide who can come in their state or city and who can't? Such a notion / decision / belief is unconstitutional, even if we may stretch our imagination to accomodate it as logical.

2) How Marathi is Marathi? I might be a disaster case, for one.

3) How Migrant is Migrant? There must be people, who have accepted this city as their home since more than five or six decades. Will they still be outsiders or migrants? And how illogical is it to expect that a person staying in your city should have a cultural makeover overnight? Is culture such a simplistic thing that can be accepted / modified suddenly? And is abiding by your culture, rituals and language a show of disrespect to the other?

I am a Maharashtrian, born of a Gujarati mother, grown up in Ahmedabad. My grandparents and their parents also stayed in Gujarat for a long time. Aaji can speak, read and write Gujarati as well as she can communicate in Marathi. It would be now close to sixty years or more, that we are based in Gujarat and I have a huge soft corner for Ahmedabad. And yet, it would be a painful and illogical dilemma if I am asked to pick one of my two origins and shun the other completely.

The uproar that arose in Mumbai recently raised a very simplistic and genuine sense of empathy with all those who were bullied and beaten on camera. The question is, how you will measure the marathi quotient of a marathi manoos. And how will you decide how migrant is migrant?

Actually no. The more important question is who, in the first place, gave you the right to sit and judge and sieve out people based on their origin, caste and language in the largest democracy of the world?